All posts tagged: Miami

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week and Ramadan Mubarak for all our Muslim brothers and sisters this week. We all know that we have to keep a safe distance and wash our hands, even during holy days – science is science whether its Jesus or Mohammed or Timothy Leary whom you worship.

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. We need a Marshall Plan for everyday people right now and the next year. Instead, we have a circus.

In other news, we’re still quarantining inside so we thought you would enjoy these cool instant classics shot in Miami recently. Please send us your art in the streets! We love to hear from you. Spread love!

It’s hard to even comment on this bellicose war-loving president and his military industry profiteers all ginning up a war against Iran – except to say, “Fool me once…”. Wait, how does that go again?

This week we take you back to the Wynwood neighborhood in Miami, where Primary Flight started a huge graffiti throwdown in the 2000s, later picked up by Tony Goldman to create Wynwood Walls. The current fare throughout the neighborhood is record-setting: from the sheer number of murals and art installations, to the parade of families and friends coming here to take tours and selfies. Catching a shot of a piece without people in the frame is like trying to run in between raindrops.

The ever-morphing conglomerate crew called 1UP appears and disappears in cities and countries across the world today, their tag aesthetics drawn from a smorgasbord of styles, rather than just one or two. On the radar, yet skillfully under it, the membership of this large team includes the raw and the polished, the illustrative and the calligraphic.

During Art Basel in December, it appears that a few writers of One United Power were in Miami outputting the simple one-color tags, tight bubbles and sparkling throw-ups, as well as full-blown productions that conjure other worlds and childhood fantasy-scapes.

You ever feel as if you are levitating above the sidewalk
when walking through the city? It happens. Maybe you just got Tui-Na in
Chinatown and your spinal column is especially stretched and tall. Maybe your
girlfriend just told you that you are definitely The One and your head is in
the clouds. Maybe you are high on opioids.

Hard to say exactly how we felt when walking in Wynwood, Miami last month when we saw this figure from Anthony Lister on the sidewalk across the street from the new Museum of Graffiti.

We’d seen the big Lister tag that accompanied this on the wall above it, smashed alongside the work of so many other artists up and down the block that have occurred since Director Alan Ket and his amazing team opened the museum during Art Basel Week a month ago.

Maybe because it differentiates itself from the myriad murals around the neighborhood, maybe because his newly abstracted superheroic figure appears to float slightly above the surface, it caught our eye and made an impression – creating a sensation of levitation without heavy optics or heavy hand.

It’s good to know that art on the street can still do that. No surprise it was Lister who pulled it off.

“Man, what’s with this cough that never goes away?” you ask your boy Tre, who’s laying on the moss green living room rug by the radiator drawing in his black book with an extra fine tip paint pen, listening to Wu Tang. “Could be January,” he offers. “Or maybe its asbestos from that work they’re doing in the elevator shaft.”

Right. “Never mind, lets watch some Beer Bowl!”

Meanwhile on the streets the ideas never stop. We were pretty excited to get up to 167th Street station to see the new mosaics by Brooklyn artist Rico Gatson, who does painting, video, sculpture and installation. These portraits of important contributors to the culture make us all proud. Here are just a handful but there are more and you should go and see them yourself.

Brexit deadlock is like a thorn in the side of the UK people this week, Trump is shutting down the US government partially here for almost a month (to celebrate 2 years in the White House?), the ‘Yellow Vests’ are striking through France for the 10th weekend, its going to get very cold tonight in New York, and your cousin Marlene is back from the local Women’s March with fire in her eyes and hope in her heart. As usual, the streets are alive with Street Art and graffiti, and we’re bringing it to you.

Words in papers, words in books
Words on TV, words for crooks
Words of comfort, words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease
Words to tell you what to do
Words are working hard for you
Eat your words but don’t go hungry
Words have always nearly hung me.

Tomokazu Matsuyama and Deih killed it this year in Wynwood, no doubt and curator Alan Ket slayed with the solo show by Vhils at the primary gallery on the compound. Art Basel brings the crowds to Miami traditionally but there is no doubt that the magnet of Wynwood’s kid-friendly murals and Street Art as selfie backgrounds wins the day. Everywhere you look you see the families, influencers-in-training, tour guides and gobsmacked gaggles of teens creating pedestrian traffic jams inside Wynwood Walls. These artists and this art may have risen from an outsider marginalised and criminalised culture of illegal vandalism but these crowds are simply enjoying the art and each other.

That foot traffic inside replicates the car and heavy truck traffic jams throughout the neighborhood as new multi-story construction continues apace and the gentrification cycle rapidly courses through the real estate / street culture corpus. Right now this romance between development and art-in-the-streets is still in the heavy petting stage, and there is a lot of star gazing. How long can this tryst continue, you ask? It’s impossible to say what benchmark to measure, but watch for the moment when the sales of mezcal slushies and Moscow Mules are eclipsed by Acai bowls and kale smoothies.

By festooning foreboding razor wire with decorative flourishes of welcome, Icy & Sot invert a symbol of exclusion and fear. The effect is shocking in its embrace of joy and color and life; the surreal visual combining two opposing views of a border that uses their contrast for unusual illumination.

In fact the brothers say this recent intervention in Miami is to address the surreality that we have been plunged into by forces who would divide us as citizens with fear-mongering, the ban on travel from majority Muslim countries and the presentation of a huge barrier wall across the southern boarder as a panacea.

Icy & Sot reliably put their finger into the wound to see how deep it goes. As artists they have also learned that a little truth goes a long way, especially when it’s an ugly truth. Maybe that explains the flowers. They tell us that because the constant flow of bad news about immigration and the government actions they weren’t able to focus and work on their future projects for a couple of days but instead they just wanted to make works in response to those actions.

“This country couldn’t have been great without its immigrants,” they tell us in a statement. As recent immigrants themselves, they feel the topic very personally. “It’s not fair that one persons decision can affect the lives of so many people inside and outside the country – we are some of those people who have been affected. We came here as immigrants and what we have accomplished here we couldn’t have accomplished anywhere else but its sad that we don’t feel the same anymore.”

Of their new art piece, they say, “Barbed wire has long been connected to crimes against humanity. A person trying to pass through or over barbed wire will suffer discomfort and possibly injury,” they say of the razor coil that often entangles a those who attemp to cross it. “In our piece we change the barbed wire into flowers, which is a metaphor for welcoming people at the borders.”

“We wanted to show how beautiful it could be to imagine a world without borders.”

For comparison’s sake, that means the “Defense Budget” is 3,900 times the size of the NEA.

Arts and artists get very little or no financial or institutional support from the federal, state, or local government in the United States, which is always a shock for Europeans to learn – and many won’t believe it when you tell them. This website, for example, receives no funding or grants from any organization despite publishing daily for almost nine years, and it has remained non-commercial during that entire time.

That is why it is rather astounding that two of Miami’s Wynwood schools, Eneida M. Hartner elementary school and Jose De Diego middle school, are completely covered in murals.

The Raw Project in Wynwood, Miami is the initiative of Robert De Los Rios, who partnered with private contributors, did fundraising, and asked a coalition of artists to paint the walls of the schools for the kids.

Part of its success of course is due to the status of the Wynwood neighborhood as a magnet for graffiti and Street Artists over the last decade or so. Already coming to Wynwood for Art Basel or to partake in a related art event, these artists have given of themselves and their talents to create a completely unique and dynamic environment for students to learn and grow up around.